Cultural Programs

For several years now, we have held numerous cultural activities including lectures, workshops, book readings and film screenings with visiting and local artists, musicians, authors, filmmakers, scholars, and craftspeople. We believe that the humanities present a formidable gateway onto culture, and by holding these events we are not only facilitating greater understanding and knowledge of the complexity and diversity of Palestinian culture and surrounding cultures of the Middle East, but we are celebrating them in our space.

In 2013, a 2,000-year-old statue of Apollo was found near Gaza, only to disappear all of a sudden. Apollo, god of art, beauty and divinations, incites all sorts of rumors, even the craziest ones. The Apollo of Gaza is at once an inquiry and a meditation on history, plunging us into the barely known reality of a territory that is still paying the price of wars and a merciless blockade, but where life also subsists, undefeated.

Maha Haj’s first feature film revolves around the dynamics characterizing a family from her hometown of Nazareth, where only the grumpy, middle-aged parents remain. One of their adult sons lives in Sweden, working as a photographer; their other son and daughter live in the West Bank in Ramallah, where the daughter’s mechanic husband is cast in a U.S. film after the director passes through his shop.

The following films were recently restored by researcher and filmmaker of the Palestine Film Unit, Khadijeh Habashneh Abu Ali, to honor the 50th anniversary of the founding of the PFU and the 10 year anniversary of the death of filmmaker and PFU founder, Mustafa Abu Ali: Scenes from Occupation in Gaza, by Mustafa Abu Ali (12 min.), They Do Not Exist, by Mustafa Abu Ali (23 min.), The Children of…., by Khadijeh Habashneh Abu Ali (22 min.)

Set partly in a refugee camp in Rafah, Gaza, this film is a remarkable look back at fifty years of Palestinian and Arab history, through photographs, reportage and the voices of these photographers today.

Mohamed Jabaly spent the summer of 2014 working with an ambulance crew before and during “Operation Protective Edge”. While numerous articles and media stories are published on the recurring violence in Gaza, they are most often from a privileged outsider perspective. Jabaly’s film is unique in presenting events from a point of view that hails from the ground.

In this film, independent journalists Max Blumenthal and Dan Cohen capture the assault on Gaza during the 2014 war and chronicle its horrific aftermath. Besides documenting Palestinian resilience and suffering, Killing Gaza also documents the war crimes committed by the Israeli military through direct testimony and evidence from the survivors, delivered often just days after escaping indiscriminate shelling, bombings and summary executions.

Looted and Hidden investigates the cinematic and other archival treasures that Israel plundered from various Palestinian visual and research institutions in Beirut in the 1980s. The film follows four historical figures who are involved in the fate of these Palestinian archives. Based entirely on archival materials, extensive research, and interviews with the individuals it portrays, this film exposes, for the first time, Palestinian materials that were erased deliberately from the public sphere by Israel and were, for many years, presumed to have been “lost.”

Rasheed documents the life of the filmmaker’s late uncle, Rasheed Broum, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Through the filmmaker’s own personal journey, Rasheed captures one of the many war stories from the southern city of Sidon, Lebanon.